writer, critic, editor

Month: July 2016

I started a regular column at Strange Horizons this year and all my longform nonfiction energies have been going there lately instead of here (which is why I thought I should widen the remit of this blog, so I’ll be doing more updates and not only essay-type posts from now on). The column’s called Marginalia. So far, I’ve published:

— “The Problem of Other Minds” in March, in which I talked about sff workshops, community & outsiderness, and the hilariously clumsy 2015 tv adaptation of Clarke’s Childhood’s End.

— “To Live and Die in Tenochtitlán” in May, in which I talked about two sf novels published in the early 90s, Aztec Century by Christopher Evans and High Aztech by Ernest Hogan, their commonalities and divergences.

— and most recently in July, “You Spin Me Right Round”, which is all about the short fiction of Kuzhali Manickavel. Specifically, I’ve talked about “Item Girls”, “Kisi Shayar Something Something”, “The Perimeter”, “Discuss How India Will Become a Prosperous and Secure Nation in the Next Five Years”, “Anarch”, “The Ash Eaters” and “The Tar Heroin Guide to Melting a Snowman”. I tried to stick as much as possible to stories that are available online, to encourage people to read them.

And for my sixth (!) appearance in Strange Horizons so far this year, my story “Sweet Marrow” just came out! This is part of the July special, Our Queer Planet. Features some lovely artwork by Alex Araiza and a podcast by Anaea Lay.

Other highlights of the first half of 2016 include:

— a great roundtable at Truancy in March, on “Intersections between South Asian Folklore, Myth and Lived Experience” along with Nin Harris, Aishwarya Subramanian, Shveta Thakrar, Sukhbir Cheema, Laila Borrie, Suna Dasi and Arun Jiwa. I also had a story come out in the same issue of Truancy, “Song to the Sun”.

— An Alphabet of Embers: An Anthology of Unclassifiables, published by Stone Bird Press and including my story “Rhizomatic Diplomacy”, is now available on Amazon as of July.

— two of my stories, “The Brack” and “The Marsh”, published on the Juggernaut Books app, which is still only available in India but will eventually be open to everyone. Juggernaut will also be publishing several new stories from me that will be exclusive on this app.

— Mithila Review also published me twice (so many pairs and doublings in this update): my essay “Blue-Shifted Futures” in April, originally written in support of Lightspeed’s POCDSF Kickstarter, and my story “Caul” in June, originally published in Black Static.